THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED:
How one young violinist revamped the mindsets of all who knew him
after his unexpected suicide
By Meagan Flynn
Photos used courtesy of Pam Joslyn
It was something they couldn’t have seen coming. But how could they have? How could
they have known that behind his ever-glowing smile was the feeling of loneliness and
sadness? How could they have ever known about his rare medical condition, or
anything about his past struggles, if he never told them? Who were they to assume that
Giles was not, in fact, okay, that his smile was not so authentic? There was a side to
Giles that they didn’t know—that no one did. They wish they could have seen it, they
wish they could have done something. But they can only wish.
Every morning at 9:15 a.m., Giles Joslyn raced down the wide campus sidewalk on his cadet
blue Belleville Trek bicycle. With slick black shades to shield his eyes and his violin strewn
across his back, Giles whisked along so hastily that he could have startled whomever he flew by.
Fragile orange and reddish leaves sprang up behind him as his white tires ripped through the
thick piles that lined the curb, and as he zoomed past you on his way to class, a subtle nod of the
head or a friendly wave would suffice in swift passing.
The bike had a classic, early twentieth century French porteur-style look to it. The seat was
brown leather, the handlebars curled inward, and the white tires had matching cadet blue
fenders. The look fit Giles. It fit his properness and well-mannered demeanor, and it fit his
fervent, adoring love for that violin—the greatest openly displayed human love for a non-human
object any of us had ever seen. It fit everything about him.
Even Giles knew it: “Since I'm tired of driving a bucket of bolts and paying $30 a week in gas
money I have decided to get the best bike I could ever get. Its the most effective commuter bike
with 3 gears, generator powered lights, racks to put packages on, and its eco friendly since its all
parts are recyclable. Plus it totally fits my personality. This bike is frickin' sweet!!!!!” He posted
that on Facebook the day he got it as a graduation present—May 4, 2011.
Everyone knew that his violin was his baby, but that bike quickly became his “second baby.”
One time, as Kelsey Beyer was entering Stalnaker, Drake University’s freshmen residence hall,
Giles, a freshman music education major, was mounting the bicycle, and he called out to her.
“Hey, Kelsey! What do you think of my bike!?”
She told him it was great. He told her how fast he could go, and how he could “zoom around” on
campus. His over-the-top excitement and enthusiasm puzzled Kelsey…. It’s just a bike, she
thought.
But to Giles, nothing was ever “just” anything. His violin was not just an instrument, but a
fragile, delicate extension of his inner self. A collection of Lord of the Rings books and movies
not just a bunch of stuff on shelves, but prized keepsakes. And a “Hey, how are ya!?” not just a
robotic question, but a sincere, outreaching gesture.
Sometimes it was hard for other students to grasp this constant happy-go-lucky attitude toward
life. It baffled them how he never had a negative thing to say, never put others down, never
pouted about anything at all.
But even more so, it baffled them when on January 5, 2012, Giles Joslyn, the seemingly
happiest, most genuinely kind person they knew, took his life in his Muscatine, Iowa home.
Why did he want to do this? Is it something we did? Something we said? What could we have
done? Why didn’t we see it coming?
On and on the questions rambled through their heads. They tried to understand, but was it even
fathomable? Most found that it was not. Most found that there was a side to Giles Joslyn that
they could not ever have known. A side no one had seen—not his parents, his instructors, or his
peers.
They came to understand that, in fact, there was more to Giles than the optimism and buoyancy
that he taught them. There was so, so much more…
Part I: Childhood
“Have you ever heard a song from so long ago with so many memories
tied to it that it made you cry? And didn't you wish that you could go back
into time when everything seemed so much simpler and carefree? Those
are songs that are the soundtrack of our lives... the ones that bring back
childhood memories, best friends, first love, first heartbreak... the
memories.” -Giles Joslyn, January 4, 2012
Giles Harper Joslyn was born Aug. 26, 1992 of Jim and Pam Joslyn, and he spent his first nine
years in White Bear Lake, Minn., a large northeast suburb of the Twin Cities.
Giles was a happy child—a very smart child. He knew his alphabet earlier than most, and in
second grade, he spent every Saturday morning writing out each president’s name in
chronological order until he memorized all of them. He once worked up enough courage that
year to write to President George W. Bush asking to one day perform with his violin at the White
House. While other kids collected baseball cards, he collected prayer cards, and he carried them
with him everywhere up until third or fourth grade.
And he was so polite—so proper. He’d approach strangers, extend his hand, and say, “Hello, how
do you do? My name is Giles.” Not only was he well mannered, but well dressed, too. Ready for
kindergarten in his white Oxford polo, navy blue sweater vest, his kakis, and shiny black shoes,
Giles would look at himself in the mirror before school and say, “Look at my outfit. Don’t I look
nice today?” Occasionally he also wore a tie, which wasn’t required, but Giles knew it boosted his
sophistication. “He was so vain when he was little,” his mother, Pam Joslyn, said.
His urge to meet new friends and his dressed-to-impress classiness was enough for an entourage
of fifth grade girls to flock to him on the playground; they’d give him a few underdogs on the
swing.
“It was kind of unusual—for a kid who’s not athletic but very outgoing—that somehow he stood
out among everyone, and I think it was because he had such extraordinary communication
skills,” his father, Jim Joslyn, said. “And his art. He was a very good artist at a young age.”
When the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button came out, Giles’s younger brother, Eli,
saw parallels right away. “That’s my brother—he’s Benjamin Button,” Eli said. “He was born 40.”
At the age of 4, Giles had already begun pleading to learn the violin. “No, Giles. You aren’t
focused enough yet,” his mother told him. But finally at 6, Giles’s persistence paid off, and Pam
and Jim enrolled him in St. Joe’s Music School, where he took the pre-play classes for his age
group.
“He wasn’t exceptional when he started,” Jim said. “But it’s one of those things he kept working
at. A lot of it was practice, practice, practice, and then somehow it just came so automatic to
him.”
When Giles was 9, he and his family moved to Muscatine. The old Iowa town is a product of
post-industrial, small-town America. Just past the barren, golden fields along Route 38, past the
farmhouses, and past the Heinz ketchup canning factory is the heart of Muscatine, where old
Ford pickups and rusty four-door Chevys line the narrow uphill streets on both sides. It’s the
town where everybody goes to the football game on Friday night, and where the movie theatre is
the hot spot on Saturday night. It’s right along the Mississippi River, and when Mark Twain
lived there in 1854, he remembered Muscatine for its summer sunsets. “I have never seen any
on either side of the ocean that equaled them,” he once wrote. The houses, each painted a
different color, are close together, and the schools are close in town, too. And the historic
downtown Muscatine, just off the river, boasts a wide variety of restaurants, pizzerias, and bar
and grilles, vintage shops, flower shops, and antique shops. The downtown strip was touristattracting, despite the small-town, family-oriented feel that consumed Muscatine.
The Joslyns live in the middle of town atop a small hill in an all-white brick house. To reach the
front door, one must ascend the 10 concrete steps from the sidewalk and follow a path through
the front yard up onto the painted blue wooden front porch, where a white rocking chair
remains still. And then there you are, at the foot of the door where Giles grew up.
When Giles came to Muscatine, there was no entourage of fifth grade girls, and his violin
instructors didn’t compare to those at St. Joe’s. But despite the changes, he adjusted to the move
well.
Giles was seemingly good at everything he worked toward. Though he never played a major role,
he also enjoyed acting. In sixth grade, he played a fish in Seussical the Musical and also the dog
in the Grinch’s Christmas Pageant. It was the first memory that Zac Pace, a junior at Drake who
also grew up in Muscatine, had with Giles. Pace played Horton the Elephant in the Seussical
play.
“You know that trope there’s no such thing as a small part, just a small actor? The last thing
Giles ever was was a small actor,” Pace said. “He just really loved performing. It didn’t matter if
he had his violin. It didn’t matter if he was dressed as a damn fish. It didn’t matter. He just liked
to be on stage expressing himself for other people’s enjoyment.”
He could act, he could play violin, he was an artist…and he could sing—a true master of the fine
arts. His instrumental talent was no secret, but his vocals were just as impressive. At his old
church in White Bear Lake, Giles’s voice could easily be picked out in the children’s choir as he
sang over everybody. When the Muscatine community heard his voice, some thought he should
hang up the violin and stick to singing.
But he didn’t do that. When he entered middle school, his career as a violinist soared. After
snagging third place in the talent show in sixth grade, he and the family celebrated at Salvatore’s
local pizzeria in downtown Muscatine. The owner saw Giles dressed up in his tux and bow tie
and asked, “How come you’re so dressed up?” Giles told him about his third place finish in the
talent show with his violin, and so the owner asked, “Will you play for us?” Giles said no, but
later, the owner came back and again asked Giles to play. “Well…maybe for a pizza,” Giles told
him. It was a deal. Giles played, and the entire restaurant erupted. People applauded
clamorously; they threw fives and ones into his violin case. Giles had found himself his first job.
The whole town came to know Giles through his gig at Salvatore’s. “That restaurant is a
Muscatine staple,” Pace said. “Everyone goes there.” He’d take song requests from each table,
and when it was slow, he’d play for the waitresses. In fact, Emily Lofgren, a senior at Drake who
also hails from Muscatine, first met Giles at Salvatore’s. When she celebrated her thirteenth
birthday at the restaurant, Giles played Happy Birthday to her. He performed there every
weekend, eventually saving enough money to purchase his first violin for $1,000.
And that first violin, it became his “baby.”
“I swear to you, that kid could make his science fair project on the violin every single year. I
don’t know how he did it,” said Pace. “I’m here in a lab growing E. Coli, and we’ve got Giles
Joslyn performing some type of experiment on his violin. He ate, slept, and breathed his violin.”
Upon entering seventh grade, Giles enrolled at the Preucil School of Music, a world-renowned
music school in Iowa City, where he found John Schultz, the man who would be his violin
instructor for the next six years before college.
“I knew right away he was going to be a fantastic fit,” Schultz said. “I knew he was going to be a
fine student and they were going to be a fine family to work with. He played with enough
passion right away that I knew, this is going to be great.”
Giles progressed very well under John Schultz. He was one of Schultz’s favorite students, and
since Giles’s lesson was often the last of the evening, Schultz often stayed late to work with Giles
on technique. There was something that distinguished Giles from Schultz’s other students,
which led Schultz to invest more time in the young violinist.
“The difficult thing is to have students develop a fingerprint with their sound,” he said. “But
Giles had that with little help from me. He also had an innate understanding that, if you fall
down, you get up and do it again and again and again. He had incredible work ethic to get things
right and hone his skills.”
However, as Giles delved further into his musical talents and abilities, he began to realize
something about himself: He was different. It seemed as though no other students could relate
to his love for classical music and the euphoria he experienced as he ran his bow over each
string. No one else had this love—no one else understood it like he did, either.
In the summer of seventh grade, when Giles came back from camp at Belin-Blank, a governor’s
institute for leadership also in Iowa City, he told his parents, “I didn’t know there were kids out
there like me.”
It wasn’t that Giles didn’t have friends at Muscatine’s Central Middle School—in fact, although
he never had any best friends or close friends, he was friends with everybody. He reached out to
everyone and anyone.
-----------------------------
Part II: High school
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t
matter, and those who matter don’t mind.” –Dr. Seuss
What is “fit in?” In retrospect, when considering whether or not Giles “fit in,” have you ever
wondered…how is it that we define “fit in?” What does it require or ask of young teenagers upon
entering the long four years of cliquish drama, intermittent periods of angst, and puberty’s
turbulent hormonal rollercoaster? Whatever it was that high school coolness asked of its
victims, Giles was exempt, or at least it appeared.
Giles was excited to begin high school. Nervous? No way. Or at least it appeared, anyway. His
mother was a science teacher at the school, and he’d often pop in to say hi. “I’d have to tell him,
‘Giles, I’m teaching. You have to let me teach!’” remembered Pam.
If you had Mrs. Joslyn as a science teacher at any point in high school, you knew Giles. Maybe
you had never met him, maybe you had never even seen him—but you knew who he was.
Though Pace had not seen much of Giles in that two-year middle school-high school gap, it was
as if he never left.
“Even though I wasn’t really seeing Giles, it was like Giles really didn’t really leave my life when I
was in high school, because Pam would talk about him and Eli all the time,” Pace said. “I’ve
never interacted with a parent who loved their children so much. Knowing Giles myself, it was
always interesting to hear the crazy thing that Giles did today.”
When Giles entered high school, he and Pace saw more of each other in Future Farmers of
America and their choir involvements. Pace soon realized that Giles had changed very little since
he knew him in that Seussical play.
“Every person has some difficulties adjusting to new scenery and with new people,” Pace said.
“The thing is, that with Giles, you just didn’t notice. Giles was always so much himself that I
think that if he was feeling like he didn’t fit in, people didn’t notice, because in some respects,
Giles didn’t fit in, and that was why people loved him. I wouldn’t say that he struggled, but he
didn’t fit in…
“…Well…What does fit in mean? Did he go with the flow? Did he not express himself? Did he
absorb other people’s identity traits? No, he didn’t. He had his own priorities and he performed
in his own specific ways. He inspired other people. With saying all that, I would say that if there
was anyone that fit in, it was Giles. If there was one person that really was able to fit in and make
everyone love him for being himself, it was him.”
However, his differences did make him a target for bullying. In spite of the fact, though, Giles’s
attitude toward everybody was the same, no matter how they treated him in return. He gave
everybody respect.
“If anyone ever said anything mean, he would be angry if I would make a big deal out of it,” said
Pam. “He always looked for the good in people, and he’d get annoyed if other people would focus
on the inadequacy of a person. He wouldn’t let anyone do that.”
—Not even his parents. One time, Jim was scolded when he called a suspicious-looking
character on a rougher side of town a “dirt bag.” “Dad!” Giles said sternly. “You don’t know that.
You can’t call him that.”
“He was so nonjudgmental of everybody,” Jim said.
Giles, in addition to music and student council and a plethora of student clubs, such as debate
and forensics, somehow also found time to run cross-country. Pam and Jim wanted Giles to take
up a sport so that maybe, he could better understand those kids who were so outwardly different
from him.
“It made him understand how hard athletes work,” Pam said. “Even though they’re talented,
they have to work at that talent in order to really be good. You can be good, but it doesn’t mean
you can be great. What you do determines your greatness. He knew that with his music, but I
wanted him to see that with athletes, too, so he could equally understand them. We just didn’t
want stereotypes.”
He was the slowest on the team, but nevertheless, he worked hard at improving, and during
races, everyone rooted for him.
His coach, Chris Foxen, once told Pam and Jim, “Giles inspires me. Whenever I think of a hard
workout that I have, I know how hard it is for him to do his workouts. All I have to do is think of
him and it helps me get through my workout.”
In the summer of 2008, Giles attended a prestigious summer music camp at the University of
Wisconsin-Stevens Point where he roomed with a cross-country runner from the Chicago
suburbs, Patrick Gallagher. It was actually the second summer when they weren’t roommates,
though, that they became closest. Gallagher would give him running tips, and the two would
compare their school’s training programs.
But that second summer, Gallagher noted that Giles had more difficulty fitting in. One cello
player’s comments made at Giles became so bothersome that Gallagher brought the problem to
the counselors’ attention on Giles’s behalf so that they could intervene.
Another kid had found out about Giles’s interest in running, and after giving him a hard time,
challenged him to a race around the track. Gallagher shot him a look of disapproval. “Hey, cool
it,” Gallagher thought. “He’s trying to better himself. So what if he can’t run fast?” But then, to
Gallagher’s surprise, the kid invited him to race as well. Reluctantly, Gallagher agreed, but hung
back at the start of the race. His objective was not to blow Giles or the instigator off the map. But
the other kid was leaving Giles in the dust, as if to humiliate him. “I’m like, I can’t let this
happen,” said Gallagher. So he picked up the pace—passed Giles, passed the kid, and ended up
beating them both by more than 30 seconds.
After the race, Gallagher took the kid aside and told him, “Hey, that was not cool what you were
trying to do. We all knew what you were going for.”
But for Giles, who earned the nickname “Champ” after handling the loss so well, it was a
learning experience. “It’s fine,” Giles told Gallagher. “It just shows me that I need to work on it.”
“Giles had a very positive attitude about everything,” Gallagher said. “Even if things didn’t go his
way, he always understood the reason why or he understood how he could learn from it.
As he progressed, Giles’s times improved on his high school team. Initially, Giles didn’t like
cross-country, didn’t look forward to it. But he decided to stick with it after he learned at the
freshmen banquet that, if he continued cross-country all four years, he would earn a varsity
letter. He originally chose cross-country because he didn’t want to hurt his hands—a logical
decision for a violinist. But perhaps there was a second reason, perhaps with a more latent
purpose.
Throughout high school, Giles struggled with body image. He wasn’t muscular or tall or thin like
many of the popular high school jocks. He wasn’t very athletic, either.
Emily Lofgren recalls one instance in which Giles only ate five almonds for lunch because he
said he was trying to lose weight.
Even his younger brother by three years, Eli, had the strong, tall, jock build. Standing at over 6
feet tall, Eli could eat whatever he wanted and not gain a pound. But Giles couldn’t. “I know he
didn’t like his body,” said Jim, “and he didn’t like the fact that he could not maintain the weight
that he would have preferred.”
Though proud of his musical talents, he wanted more. He wanted athleticism—or at least a more
athletic body. Perhaps he wanted to be more like Eli.
He and his brother were actually “polar opposites,” though, Pam said—which is another reason
why Pam and Jim had Giles take up a sport and Eli learn an instrument, hoping they’d
understand each other better. Because of their separate interests and talents, there was never
any competition for spotlight—nothing like that. Granted, they were ornery, and they fought—
though nothing unlike your typical set of age-gapped brothers.
But there was something about Giles that Eli never knew. In fact, there was something about
him that no one knew.
Giles was born with a set of XO and XY chromosomes, meaning he was born part male, part
female—a rare intersex condition, a genetic disorder similar to Turner’s Syndrome. However,
the doctors didn’t know until Giles was 1.
At birth, one of his testicles was displaced—which was normal for 1 in 100 newborn boys, Pam
said. So they visited the urologist, who told them that if it did not descend in one year, doctors
would have to bring it down surgically.
One year had passed, but nothing changed. At the age of 1, Giles endured the surgery. The
doctors found something worse, though—it was more complicated than they had thought. They
found a partial uterus and a partial fallopian tube. A genetic analysis revealed the XO
chromosomes mixed in with his male XY chromosomes. Because his tissues were
undifferentiated and his testicle was at risk of cancer, the testicle was removed, along with the
partial uterus and fallopian tube.
From there, Giles visited an endocrinologist every six months for checkups, and when the doctor
thought it was time for puberty, Giles began taking injections of growth hormones and
testosterone.
Eli didn’t know about his brother’s condition until after his death.
“He never wanted anyone to know,” Pam said. “He didn’t want anyone to ever feel sorry for him
or to know his limitations.”
It limited him athletically. Physically, Giles wouldn’t be able to play basketball or football, Jim
said. And it especially bothered him that he could never have children.
During college, Giles had intramuscular injections once every month. However, when Jim
cleared out his room in January, he only found three needles in his canister, indicating that
Giles didn’t take his December shot. Without the testosterone shot, his estrogen levels rise,
potentially causing greater risk of depression. Did it contribute to his decision? Impossible to
know. The needles could have been left over from the summer. “We’ll never know why he did
what he did,” said Pam. “We question if it was part hormonal.”
They also question if the condition influenced his sexuality. It seemed as though Giles was never
interested in girls, never interested in boys—just had friends. His senior year, he had planned on
asking a girl to the prom, but chickened out. He went alone both years, but said he had fun
dancing with friends.
His condition was something that lurked in the back of his mind, but that was where it stayed.
Though it limited him athletically and physically, it didn’t limit how he expressed himself
artistically, or how he treated others with the respect they deserved, and it most definitely didn’t
limit his aspirations or his determination to reach them.
After a year or two in high school, Giles knew exactly what he wanted to do. He aspired to
become a music teacher for young kids. He often told his mother, “I don’t know what else I
would do, Mom, if I didn’t do music.”
Upon moving to Muscatine, Giles gradually realized that opportunities for string players were
limited. When he lived in White Bear Lake, Giles had season tickets to the Minneapolis
Symphony Orchestra, a luxury that was unavailable to kids in Muscatine. For his own private
lessons, Giles had to drive to Iowa City, 45 minutes to an hour away.
“He knew how fortunate he was to have all that,” said Jim. “He really felt like kids here didn’t
have opportunities to do that. He wanted to somehow spread that music.”
In the tenth grade, he began giving private violin lessons to young kids in his living room for five
bucks a lesson.
And at the age of 17, Giles established “Stringfest” at Muscatine High School, a benefit concert
he designed with the purpose of promoting and upholding the orchestra program at MHS while
providing more opportunities for students to learn strings.
In the Stringfest program for his guests, Giles wrote, “Many students in Muscatine do not have
the resources to take private music lessons. In addition, many orchestra instruments in our
school district are in dire need of repair or need to be replaced. In order to provide the students
with an opportunity for lessons, I have organized a benefit concert to raise funds for music
lessons, instrument repairs, and instrument purchases.”
In its debut year, Stringfest raised $1,500 for the orchestra program, $600 of which was put
toward the purchase of a new cello. In addition, three $300 scholarships were given to students
so they could start taking private music lessons. The national organization, DoSomething.org,
granted Giles $500 for the benefit concert as well.
Giles also did Stringfest his senior year, and in the spring of 2012, although without Giles, the
orchestra students of MHS will do it again. The community’s Carver Foundation gave $20,000
to the orchestra program in Giles’s memory.
“He knew right away at a young age there was a certain power in music making,” John Schultz
said. “He knew there was a greater good he could serve through his music.”
At the end of high school in the senior superlatives, Giles, along with Emily Summers, was voted
“Most Likely to Change Society” by fellow classmates.
“He was someone who wanted to make a difference,” said Summers. “He accepted every person
he knew, he didn’t judge anyone, and he was friends with everyone…He cared so much about
helping others out, it was almost expected for him to win that.”
On May 29, Giles walked across the stage to accept his diploma with his Muscatine Class of ’11.
From there, he was headed for Drake University in Des Moines, where he would major in music
education.
------------------------
Part III: Giles in college
“I can still remember how that music used to make me smile. And I knew if
I had my chance, that I could make those people dance.”
–Don McLean, “American Pie”
The first time I ever saw Giles was our first Friday night at Drake, two days after moving in.
Fifteen or so freshmen packed into Justin Duruji and Dane Van Brocklin’s third floor Stalnaker
dorm room to cheer them on in a heated dance-off, and then, enter Giles. As soon as he opened
the door, the entire room greeted him with a “GILES!! WHAT’S UP, MAN!?!” One of them said,
“This kid’s legit.” And Giles’s face was so lit up, his smile so large—almost alarmed at the
overwhelmingly enthusiastic welcome from the group. He said hello and took his spot against a
bedpost.
To understand him in this new college setting, there are a few things you have to remember
about him. First and foremost, you have to remember that he still hadn’t changed much since
the sixth grade Seussical play—personality-wise, that is. And you have to see him outside of your
own context. You can’t compare his ways to your own ways. You can’t try to understand his
character based on your own character, because really, his character wasn’t based on anyone
else’s like yours. Because Giles wasn’t your typical beer-loving, girl-seeking, freedom-crazed
college frat boy. He was far more mature than that, yes. But he was also still the same happy-golucky Giles.
“In order to really capture Giles, you have to realize that…for some people, when they get to
college, you notice a really significant change, where they’re acting differently or performing
differently in their new role as a college student,” Pace said. “If there’s one thing about Giles, it’s
that he didn’t change. He always had such a sincere outlook on the world and he was very much
accepting of other people. He wanted to know your story. He wanted to know what you were
about.”
Giles had little trouble meeting new friends, and for freshman Katie Fries, he was her first
friend.
Fries went to high school in La Crosse, Wis. with two of Giles’s cousins, Annie and Jennifer
Joslyn. When they found out Fries was going to Drake, they told her to look out for their cousin,
Giles Joslyn.
During the summer orientation was when Fries first met him. She was heading over to the
sundial outside of the Fine Arts Center to meet her orientation group, and there was only one
other kid there as early as she. He was the first to introduce himself.
“I’m Giles Joslyn,” he said.
“Something clicked,” said Fries. “I knew I should remember that name. I said my name, and it
looked like the same kind of thing was going in on in his head, like, ‘I should know you.’ The
light bulb went off at the same time, because his cousins had told him about me.”
That night was karaoke night, which was when Fries knew, “This is my friend.” Halfway through
the night, Giles got up on stage—the first solo performer of the night. Before he started singing,
he said to the group, “If you’re interested in this song, if you like it at all, you should come sing it
with me.”
It was Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.
“Who does that? Giles does that,” said Pace.
Half of the orientation group got up on stage with him to belt out the classic, and there was a
“severe amount of head banging,” Fries said.
At one point in the song, Giles and Fries found themselves side-by-side, and they slung an arm
around each other.
“In that moment of everyone being so self-conscious and not wanting to put themselves out
there, he was one of the first to say, ‘I don’t care, laugh at me if you want, but I’m gonna rock
out,’” said Fries. “It was really awesome.”
On Wednesday, Aug. 17, Giles, along with his freshman class of 812, packed up his 18 years of
life and headed for Drake. It was move-in day.
His roommate, Chris Kottenstette, had just returned from lunch with his parents to find Giles
and Pam and Jim settling in. They shook hands, and Kottenstette said, “Hello, my name is
Chris,” as he extended his business card with his left hand. “If you ever need anything, give me a
call,” he said.
His professionalism impressed Pam. Kottenstette was an actuarial science major, a former
varsity basketball and soccer athlete, and the Valedictorian of his close-knit Catholic school class
of 12 from Burlington, Iowa.
After saying their goodbyes to their parents, Kottenstette and Giles got to know each other. They
talked about what they did in high school, why they chose Drake, their aspirations, and
Kottenstette particularly remembers Giles’s excitement in showing off his Lord of the Rings
movie collections and golden-plate-paged book series.
The two got along just fine. On the second night, Giles brought out his violin. Its sound echoed
through the third floor hall, and eventually, up to 20 people crammed into Giles’s room and
crowded the doorway so they could hear him play. They chit-chattered about his skill, how fast
his fingers moved across the strings, how many people were in the room, how his eyes were
closed. “This is how I’ll get to sleep every night,” Kottenstette whispers. “How does he memorize
all of that?” another girl asks.
At one point, a girl who was filming the performance turns the camera to Kottenstette and says,
“Say, ‘Hello, best roommate ever.’” “Hello, best roommate ever,” Kottenstette repeats. They
point to Giles for the camera.
But no one ever saw Giles play like Kottenstette did—when he was the only one watching.
“I could try to put words to [describe how he played], but it really doesn’t do it justice,” said
Kottenstette. “The way he would play, it was almost like he was in another world. Just the way
he treated it with such…delicacy… It was so natural. The way that he played when no one else
was around…he just wasn’t on Earth anymore.”
Kottenstette saw sides of Giles that no one had. The happiest he had ever seen Giles was when in
one of his favorite movies, August Rush, an 11-year-old boy conducts a symphony orchestra in
front of hundreds in the movie’s last five minutes.
Kottenstette would be at his desk indulged in homework when, out of the corner of his eye, he
would see Giles’s face brighten, his eyes widen with incredible joy. Giles would call Kottenstette
over to watch—“Chris, you’ve gotta hear this,” he’d say.
The eyes of the young conductor gleamed as soon as the first note was played. The vibration of
the strings’ sound was amplified; the brightness of the spotlight, intensified; and the gliding of
fingers across each string, magnified. The audience was awestruck at the beauty of the orchestral
sounds. And so was Giles. Every element of the orchestra was on display; every element was
painted with feeling. Giles felt it all.
Perhaps that was why he loved the scene so much. Perhaps it embodied the feeling that he
couldn’t put into words—the love that he felt for his violin.
He tried to describe the mere sound of it to a fellow musician on the third floor, Chris Fairbank,
once. He described his violin’s sound as “smooth butterscotch” in comparison to other violins,
some of which he described as “thick maple syrup.”
“He was making sounds into flavors,” Fairbank said. “He chose his words so carefully, especially
when describing his violin. He picked each word so meticulously, because he knew no one else
could really understand the feeling. Even as a musician, I didn’t really understand, but I really
respected his passion.”
Giles would play often, but not too often—just enough so it was enjoyable. He would often stay
up in the lobby until 1 or 2 a.m.—or sometimes as late as 3 or 4—to practice his violin. Even on
weekends, Stalnaker residents would leave at 9 for a night out and return at 2 a.m., and Giles
would still be down there, still practicing.
One time, he practiced so long that his violin bruised his neck. He got teased for that one,
lightheartedly. But it was not much of a joke to Giles. If anything, the bruise was a mark of
dedication, not something to joke about.
Though he stayed up so late practicing, he still woke up for 8 a.m. class every day of the week—
or at least tried to. It was usually Kottenstette who yelled for him to shut off the alarm since
Giles was too tired to even hear it…It was the Red Bull that kept him up.
After first discovering it about a week into school, it became his drug. “He had no problem
drinking two Red Bulls in a half hour at 1:30 [in the morning],” said Kottenstette. He’d chug
one, throw it on the ground, and crush it with his foot, as if displaying some newfound college
manhood power.
In fact, he actually was older than all of us. He turned 19 on Aug. 26., just two weeks into the
school year. The resident assistant, Ellie Ehrhardt, made him a card in the shape of a violin and
had the whole floor sign it. Nicole Kasperbauer, who lived on the fourth floor, decorated his door
with streamers and signs that read “Happy 19th Birthday, Giles!!!!” Laura Juscczyk, Giles’s
former high school teacher and a friend of Pam’s, happened to be in Des Moines that day, and
she dropped off 60 or so cupcakes—chocolate, vanilla, red velvet, and all wonderfully
decorated—that Pam had ordered him for his birthday.
In the evening, Giles said that he had already eaten dinner at the campus dining hall, but 13 or
14 of us insisted he come out to dinner at a nice restaurant to celebrate his birthday properly. He
happily obliged, deciding that he could make some more room in his stomach for a meal with
friends. We hopped on the city bus and headed to Valley West Mall in West Des Moines to look
for a restaurant, eventually settling on a small sports bar.
Halfway through dinner, Giles, who sat across from me at the long table, asked me how my
macaroni was. It was delicious, I told him, and I asked how his burger was—or perhaps it was a
grilled cheese or B.L.T. He said it was also delicious, and then he told me, “You know, this is the
best birthday I’ve ever had.”
It wasn’t over yet, though. That night, we promised we’d find him a party, which was rumored to
be on 25th Street. A group of more than 20 of us banded together as we left Stalnaker.
When we finally made it to 25th, before even reaching the doorstep of the supposed house, we
were told the ever disappointing “Sorry, invite only” news. So we kept searching. There had to be
a party going on somewhere, we thought. As we passed a few guys lounging on their porch with
beers, they broke out singing Asher Roth’s “I Love College”: “Freshmen! Freshmen! Do
somethin’ crazy! Do somethin’ crazy!” they yelled, perhaps mocking our naivety as first-years.
We probably walked for over an hour-and-a-half before finally giving up and heading back to the
dorms. But despite never finding anything, Giles still seemed content and cheery. “You could
just tell how happy he was just being with us and being a part of a group,” said Jane Thottiyil,
who lived on the fourth floor. “Even though everyone was upset we couldn’t find anything, Giles
still made it fun and still seemed like he was having a good time.”
Giles seemed to be getting along very well at Drake. Pam only asked that he call home at least
every three days, and when they talked, he told her “This is my new home,” and that he loved his
floor. “We’re like a family,” he said.
“I thought Giles loved Drake,” said Pace. “Goddamn, he even loved the f---in’ food! I remember
having a lengthy conversation with him on the drive home about how much he loved the food.
I’m sitting here, and I’m ready to crash my car because I can’t handle how much he likes Sodexo
food. He didn’t have a single negative thing to say about the campus—about the experience.”
In the academic realm, Giles found most success in Professor Tom Sletto’s intro to music
education class. The purpose of the class is to help students decide if they prefer performing or
teaching—or in some cases, both.
At the beginning of the school year, Sletto remembers Giles telling him, “I love to perform, but I
love to teach even more.”
“That’s a pretty big realization for a first-year student,” said Sletto, “because a lot of them come
here with stars in their eyes and want to get a job in places like the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
That was pretty amazing for a young man in his first year here that his heart really lied with
teaching.”
Giles could hardly wait to graduate so he could start giving lessons. He even inquired about
volunteer opportunities at Des Moines elementary schools to teach strings to young kids.
“He’d volunteer for no money,” Sletto said. “That’s why I knew that he was one of those kids who
was meant to be a teacher. His heart and soul was there. Money was not important.”
Giles’s extensive private lessons with Schultz and extra music theory classes in Iowa City proved
beneficial in college. His knowledge on composers was vast—he had studied different ones
effusively every year since he was 10.
Once, Giles’s hall neighbor, Kyle McNett, who played in the band in high school and had played
piano for several years, attempted to challenge Giles’s classical music knowledge…and Giles put
him to shame. “He started listing off names I’ve never even heard of,” said McNett. “There
wasn’t even a comparison. He knew all the guys I knew, but then he knew a completely wider
range. It put me in my place.”
Talk to him about music, and he’ll talk for hours. But in group settings, Giles was quieter—more
reserved. Occasionally, he’d pop in McNett and Braeden Stanley’s room for “talk times,” but
usually kept to himself about what he had or hadn’t done and about his high school past. When
it was his turn to tell about his most complicated relationship, he didn’t have any, he said. But
he told us about his first and only kiss on a choir bus trip when he was 15 during a frisky game of
truth or dare. His face turned bright red and his voice shook when he spoke. He didn’t want to
get into details, but he shared a laugh with the group of 13 or so about the silliness of the game.
He may have been timid in groups, but on individual bases, he was indulgent. He was the one
who remembered your passions and interests. He remembered your birthday. And if he
remembered he hadn’t spoken to you in a while, he’d greet you with sincerity and ask how you
were.
“He actually engaged in people,” said Raven Garrison, who also lived on third floor. “He was
genuinely interested in what people had to say to his questions, and he was genuinely interested
in how people were feeling that day.”
------------------------ Part IV: What they never saw
“Some brands of spirituality focus on the soul, that metaphysical nugget
at the core of each of our being. To the contrary, the soul is not something
fixed and eternal, but is as fluid as our lives are. Nevertheless, the
language of soul implies a depth that the language of self does not.”
–Robert C. Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic
In Giles’s First Year Seminar spirituality class, one of the primary arguments in readings from
Robert C. Solomon’s Spirituality for the Skeptic was that taking risks is essential to the concept
of “living life to the fullest.” To exemplify this concept, Professor Jennifer Harvey told the class
about the wish of her 3-year-old daughter, Harper, who wanted to take a hot air balloon ride at a
West Des Moines festival, a risky thrill for a mother to allow.
“Taking risks in life can actually be a very important way to live life fully,” Harvey said.
“Sometimes the experiences that we’re afraid of but that we engage in anyway can really enrich
our lives. But for folks who take extreme risks all the time, that can be like denying death and
disregarding that your life is sacred.”
So she asked the class to distinguish: Was the hot air balloon ride worth the risk? Was it too
dangerous? Was it a life-enriching experience?
Some students objected and said, “You don’t let her go up in a hot air balloon—she’s 3 and
you’re in charge of her!” But others embraced her daughter’s wish and thought, yes, though it
was risky, it was life-enriching.
Giles was one of them. He told her, “Of course you should let her go up in the hot air balloon!
She’ll be amazed! She’ll love it! You’ve gotta let her have the hot air balloon ride.” The first thing
Giles asked Harvey the following week was, “So…did you let her do it?” He said it with a rather
mischievous look, as if he was really saying, “You better have let her.”
“He was really adamant that it was really important to let her have that experience,” Harvey
said. “So he was on the side of risk-taking and really loving life, which was very consistent with
his love for music and his engagement [in class].”
However, there was something it was not consistent with at all: the decision he made the
following January. His decision was such an utter contradiction of every concept that Giles
seemed to have embodied in his FYS class—living life fully, appreciating the little details, loving
life—that it so puzzled those who knew him. Clearly, there must have been a whole other side to
Giles that no one had seen.
For his FYS class, Giles wrote a paper on death in the beginning of the semester. But it’s nothing
to be immediately alarmed about—a majority of Harvey’s students chose the topic as well.
Harvey had asked that the students choose one chapter from Solomon’s book and write about
the theme of the chapter from their perspective. The seventh chapter was on death.
“[Solomon] is writing about death to argue that recognizing that we die is good reason for us to
take very seriously that we should live life fully,” said Harvey. “The author talks about that
believing in an afterlife can really be a way of trying to ignore the fact that we’re finite and we
die, and that when we ignore the fact that we die, then we are less likely to live life fully. Giles
and most of my students were very, very offended by that argument.”
After his death, Harvey reread his paper a million times over, searching for some kind of red
flag. She had worked with suicidal students before and had been able to recognize the flags in
their work, but she couldn’t find a single one with Giles.
There was one part of the essay, though, that struck her as odd. When describing his idea of the
afterlife, he wrote:
“When I look out the window and see it’s a beautiful day, naturally, I start thinking about the
afterlife.”
Harvey commented in the margin, Interesting. Can you explain this a little bit?
“I would think if it’s a beautiful day…it’s not natural to me that this would make me think of the
afterlife,” said Harvey. “It would make me think of ‘Wow, this is a beautiful day, how awesome
to be alive!’ It would make me think of this life.”
Though his troubles were not as noticeable in Harvey’s class, they were in his private instruction
with Professor Sarah Plum. With Plum, his focus seemed “off,” and he had great difficulty
retaining new information—new music. Sometimes, he’d quit playing in the middle of an
orchestra rehearsal, Derrin Sellers remembers, and no one understood why. Perhaps it was out
of frustration, or perhaps he had made an irritable error—no one knew. But it was clear that he
was struggling. On several occasions, Plum had asked him, “Is everything okay, Giles?” And
several times he told her, “No, no, everything’s fine.”
It perplexed Plum, because during his two visits with her in the spring and summer for auditions
prior to attending Drake, Giles played impressively. What she saw of him now didn’t match up
to who he was beforehand.
“It was always inexplicable,” Plum said. “It felt like there was a piece of the puzzle missing.”
Toward the end of the fall semester, Plum’s students Megan Kassmeier and Hannah Wright,
who was Giles’s violin stand partner, told Plum that they were going to make more of a
conscious effort to get to know Giles next semester and make him feel more included. He was
picked on subtly—nothing outrageous, more in a joking matter. But it was clear that Giles was
usually on the outskirts of the group.
In fact, Giles spent a lot of time alone. Kayli Kunkel, who lived on the third floor, ate at Quad
Creek Café almost every day. And almost every day, she saw Giles eating there alone.
“Every single time I went there, I thought, next time I’m gonna sit by him. Or next time, I’m
gonna ask him to get food with me. I’m gonna talk to him and make him feel okay. And I never
did,” said Kunkel. “When I first heard that he died, that’s immediately what I thought of—all the
times I told myself I was gonna do that and never did.”
Seeing him alone, it panged her.
“It makes me so sad that he was struggling like that, but he still managed to be so friendly to
everyone else,” Kunkel said. “No one was there for him, but he was there for everyone else.”
When Giles wasn’t at class or practicing violin, eating, or sleeping, he was on his laptop in his
room in that big comfy chair against the back wall that faced the door, so that when you came in,
there he was looking over his laptop at you, sitting so properly with his feet close together, his
back straight, and his computer resting perfectly on his lap. He’d be watching funny YouTube
videos or Netflix. It was almost difficult to tell: Did Giles do this out of enjoyment? Or was it that
he felt uninvited to join the groups outside of his room down the hall?
When I drove out to his Muscatine home to meet Pam and Jim, the first thing I noticed when I
entered the living room was that chair. It seemed so out of context and unfamiliar outside of the
dormitory setting, so foreign in its surroundings. Rarely had I seen the chair without Giles in it,
and the contrast of the tangibility of his chair and the intangibility of Giles himself rested so
unnervingly in my mind. It was as if I wanted to see him sitting in it, watching Netflix and
YouTube—but only in my mind, I knew.
It panged me.
“Can music save your mortal soul? ...Man, I dig those rhythm and blues. I
was a lonely teenage broncin' buck…But I knew I was out of luck, the day
the music died.” –Don McLean, “American Pie”
On the drive home from fall break in mid-October, Giles, who had buckled in his violin—his
baby—in the backseat of Zac Pace’s Dodge Intrepid, told Pace about how excited he was to cook
at home, about how school was going, and of course about how much he loved the Sodexo food.
But there was one other thing Giles was itching to tell him that Pace had not expected.
“Before he would tell me this story, he made me promise I would never tell his mother,” Pace
said.
It was a deal, so Giles went on. He described this night as the best of his life.
The previous weekend, Giles, for the first time, had experienced the college drinking culture that
every teenager sees in PG-13 movies, scrolls through on the Internet, reads about in books, and
hears about from friends.
No one would have thought it would be something Giles would partake in. In fact, when he told
us once during talk time that he had partied at the University of Iowa—plenty of times, even—we
wrote it off without a second thought. Giles?? No way. Likewise, Pace was shocked at Giles’s
drinking story.
It was an October Friday night, and some of the guys had been pre-gaming before a night out.
Giles watched as the boys passed around the handle of cheap, watered-down Hawkeye vodka,
and when it made its way around the circle to him, Giles did something surprising: He asked for
a swig. “Are you sure?” they asked him. He was sure, he said. Before putting it to his lips, he
hesitated and looked down at the plastic handle of throat-singing alcohol as if to say, “Do I
really want to do this?” He went for it. And as soon as he swallowed, he shook his head at its
nastiness and made a sour face as the sting of the alcohol seared his throat and stomach. But
when the handle made its way back around, he asked for another drink. It was like he had
ascended to a new level of manliness.
When it was time to leave, no one had invited Giles to tag along. Gradually, the group had
dispersed, until Giles was alone again. But in the hallway, Giles caught one of the frat boys, who
was headed to the local waterhole with a few girls, on his way out. Giles asked if he could come,
and the frat boy told him of course. At the bar, Giles asked the frat boy what he should order and
settled on what he was having—a Sam Adams Oktoberfest lager. They sat down at a booth with
the three girls—who were also at a bar for their first time—and talked and laughed until closing
time.
A handful of us were snacking and chatting in the third floor hall when Giles and the group
returned. Giles approached me. “Meagan!! Hi! How was your night?” “Oh it was good, Giles.
How was your night is the better question!” “Meagan, in all honesty, it was the best night of my
life!”
His glossy eyes said it all. Giles was bouncing off the walls, but he was happy. That was
unmistakable. The next morning, he told Soelter the same thing—that he had the time of his life.
“This person who passed is telling you this was the best night of his life…That’s both alarming as
well as inspirational in some respects,” said Pace. “When you meet Giles, you would think that
every day was the day of his life. And so for him to acknowledge one time that was the best night
of his life, that’s really meaningful.”
It’s no secret that underage drinking is a part of college culture. For young people, there’s a
certain allure associated with the red cup, beer pong crazed, unsupervised frat party. But the
stigmatizing misconception lies in why students choose to drink. Quite frankly, it’s not all about
who can get the drunkest, explained Pace.
“One of the redeeming qualities of that story is the fact that Giles was engaging with a culture in
discourse that was larger than himself,” he said. “It was good for him to be engaging with peers
in that way, and it was beneficial to his experience. The social aspect of drinking is really
important. The number one thing you have to remember in that situation was that alcohol didn’t
make that the best night of his life.
“It’s about the camaraderie, and the fact that, the next day when you’re hungover and you feel
like you died and got hit by a bus, you know that the person who was taking shots with you also
feels that way,” Pace said. “You went there together. That’s what matters—the overall
experience, not just the fact that you’re drinking and that you’re breaking the law. That is part of
it, but it’s more about breaking the law together. It’s not about getting drunk, it’s about doing it
together—having that shared sense of responsibility. You can’t give alcohol the agency to make it
entirely responsible for the experience. That’s giving alcohol way too much power in our
society.”
Giles longed for camaraderie—longed to feel included, to be a part of the group, to feel that he
had experienced college for what he heard it was.
But people didn’t realize that about him. The party scene was not where anyone saw Giles. Giles
and drinking seemed outright incompatible. So, other than for his birthday and the one night in
October, people didn’t invite Giles out. Not because they didn’t like him, not because they didn’t
want him to come, but because they assumed he didn’t fit that scene, or, moreover, that he was
not the person who would want to fit that scene. It wasn’t until that October night that it started
to become noticeable, that Giles so desired to experience the social aspect of college for what is
was worth. Maya Sullivan, who lived down the hall from Giles, noticed it on various occasions.
One night earlier in the year, Giles had invited her out to a party. After the crowds had dispersed
and left for the night, and while Sullivan chatted in the hallway with friends, Giles came out of
his room. He asked Sullivan where everybody had gone, but she didn’t know. Giles had hoped to
join them that night, so he asked Sullivan to come with him to find the party. “Why do you want
to go to this party?” Sullivan asked him. Giles gave her a reason, but the only thing Sullivan
remembers him saying before anything else was “I don’t know,” which for her was not a good
enough reason to put on “going out clothes.”
“I think he really wanted to go and meet up with them, it just didn’t work out,” she said. “And I
felt like that kept happening, where despite his efforts, plans would fall through or plans would
change, and he was never the first to know about it.”
The only other time I had seen him out was at the campus-wide Halloween party at a fraternity.
As we were leaving, Giles was outside standing in the line to get in, owning his Lord of the Rings
Frodo costume. He appeared to be alone—perhaps he walked over after the Stalnaker Halloween
Dance. Whether or not he was alone, as he waved to us, he smiled largely.
Earlier that night, Giles had rocked the Stalnaker dance. He had been preparing his costume for
the Stalnaker costume contest for weeks. Braeden Stanley remembers when Giles’s Lord of the
Rings sword that he ordered off the Internet finally arrived.
“Braeden, you need to come see something awesome,” Giles told him. “Okay, what is it?” Stanley
asked. “You’ll see.” So, Stanley took a study break and followed Giles into his room, where Giles
hoisted a giant, glowing blue replica of Frodo’s sword, “Sting,” from Lord of the Rings. Not only
did it light up, but it made noise, too. Giles told him his hobbit costume plan for Halloween and
showed him the hobbit ears he planned on wearing.
On Saturday, Oct. 29, with his light-up sword as his trademark costume-give-away, and in his
earthy-colored full cape, hobbit ears, white button-up and kaki shorts, and, of course, the
drawn-on hobbit foot hair, Giles won the costume contest outright.
After the Halloween weekend was over, Giles needed to dispose of the jack-o-lantern he had
carved. Instead of putting it in the trash outside, Giles offered up the pumpkin to the third floor
boys, who had a better idea of what to do with it: drop it down the Stalnaker stairwell.
So at about 5 a.m., Giles and the gang of third floor boys took the pumpkin to the top of the
fourth floor stairs with their phone video cameras in hand. Brady Oates, a football player from
the end of the hall, asked Giles if he wanted to drop it, but Giles told Oates he could do the
honors. And within a matter of seconds, the pumpkin splattered onto the basement cement
floor. It sounded like a gunshot—and like first grade girls, they snickered and sprinted away to
the elevator before anybody could see them.
“I’ll never forget the look on his face and his sheer excitement after we dropped the pumpkin,”
said Oates.
The pumpkin drop was the start of the third floor prank war. Soelter had his room Saran
wrapped, McNett and Stanley had their room spontaneously rearranged, and Giles left
Christmas music blasting in his locked room while he was at a three-hour night class. The boys
broke in, unplugged the speakers, and stuck a note on his iPod deck: “You mess with third floor,
third floor will mess with you!”
To get him back, the boys hid an alarm clock behind his desk set for 4 in the morning.
As Stanley passed Giles’s door on his way to 8 a.m. class, there was the alarm clock, dangling
from the door handle by its mutilated wires. On the whiteboard, Giles drew an arrow pointing to
it and wrote, “Don’t mess with a man while he’s sleeping. It took me 30 seconds with my hands,
feet, and teeth to do this.”
After leaping out of bed and rummaging through his things to find the damn alarm, Giles ripped
it out of the power strip, threw it on the ground, stomped on it, then grabbed it, broke it open
with his bare hands, and bit out the wires with his teeth.
Of course, all in good spirits, though. The prank war continued all the way through finals week.
“Giles wasn’t really a prankster at all until we dropped that pumpkin, and then after that,
everything got a lot more fun on the floor because we had everyone in on it,” Oates said. “It
hasn’t quite been the same since. But I’m sure he’s watching. I’m sure he’s still got the same
smile on his face, sprinting down the hallway with us.”
----------------------- Part V: What they’ll never forget
“So bye, bye Miss American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee
was dry. And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singing
this'll be the day that I die. This'll be the day that I die.”
–Don McLean, “American Pie”
It had been a whirlwind of a semester, and the long-anticipated yet dreadful, headache-inducing
finals week was upon us.
This last week, however, was not so illustrative of Giles’s character. We saw less of him than
usual, and he began to slack in his schoolwork—which was never typical—particularly in
Harvey’s class.
His final paper was incomplete, Harvey said, and he did not turn in his previous paper that was
due toward the end of the semester.
Then Giles missed his jury—an orchestra term—in which the student plays privately in front of a
few professors. This, by far, was unusual.
In fact, it was just as unusual that he hadn’t called home in three days. He had only done that
one other time earlier in the semester, but this time, he hadn’t returned the call after Pam left a
first voicemail.
So she tried again. And again, no answer.
“Hey! If you want to get a ride home for Christmas, you might want to give us a call,” she said in
the message. “Your dad will be there Saturday morning. He works Friday night.”
Giles returned it this time.
“That night, he told me he missed jury. He said he wrote the time down wrong,” Pam said. “But
here’s the kid who always had to manage a schedule so tight, so what was it that made him miss
it? It seemed like a lot of things fell apart. What happened that would make you get to the point
where you miss things, you’re not turning things in, or whatever it was…how did you get there,
and why?”
Since Jim would not be able to pick him up until that Saturday, most students had already left,
and Giles spoke to very few people in his last few days at Drake.
The day that Kottenstette left for break, his friend, Mikhala, who he had eaten lunch with, asked
to meet Giles before leaving. She had heard a lot about him and wanted to finally put a face with
the name.
Giles and Mikhala got to talking easily, and they soon discovered their common interest: Lord of
the Rings. Giles proceeded to show off all his memorabilia—a perfect parallel to when
Kottenstette first met him on move-in day.
“It was like, even though time had gone by, Giles was still the same Giles,” Kottenstette said.
“Being able to see Giles really be able to talk knowing that no one in the room was judging him, I
think that was really good for him. It’s definitely a good last memory that I have of Giles.”
Soon, almost everyone on his floor was gone, and Giles was alone—so alone that not even
Stanley, who lived across the hall, knew Giles was still there.
In fact, just a few days earlier he had seen Giles on his way back from the Fine Arts Center and
considerately asked him how he was doing, but Giles was not his usual cheery self.
“He just looked so upset and so angry at whatever happened—his test or performance, or… I
don’t know what it was, but he would not talk about it,” said Stanley. “For the rest of finals week,
he was really upset and quiet most of the time. I wished I had talked to him more about what
was bugging him. Aside from that one time, I had never seen him upset before.”
When Jim picked up Giles Saturday morning, he still was unaware that Giles had missed jury.
Giles had asked his mother not to tell him so that he could tell him himself.
“I was mad at him,” Jim said. “I said to him, ‘You know Giles, you could have come home with a
clean slate, and now you have this hanging over your head.’ I was disappointed with him.”
In the car Giles told him, “What bothers me is that I had that piece down, and I missed it.”
But Jim doubts it. Over break, Giles was not practicing up to par. Pam and Jim both noticed and
thought it was odd.
“It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t to the standard that I was used to him playing,” said Pam.
However, other than his strangely dry and peeling hands, nothing struck them as immediately
peculiar about his behavior. The ensuing holidays had been relaxing and well-spent with family.
Actually, Giles had said he had “the best Christmas ever.” Pam and Jim had taken the boys to
the mall to shop for their presents, and Giles picked out some sweaters and a slick black jacket.
The Joslyns hosted the family Christmas, and their tree was fabulous—a real one standing
almost 11 feet tall.
New Year’s had never been a big event for the Joslyns. Pam, Jim, and Giles and Eli were all in
bed well before the ball drop, and Giles’s Facebook status on New Year’s Day seemed to
demonstrate his excitement for the year ahead: “i am going to rock in the 2012 year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
But his missed schoolwork hung over his head like a rainy, gray cloud. To make up for jury, Giles
had to record a private performance for Professor Plum on a DVD, and since he did not turn in
one of his papers and his final was incomplete, Harvey put an F in the online grade book on
Jan.3.
Shortly before break, Giles had sent her an e-mail that said, “I’ve had the flu, and my life’s been
generally a wreck. So the third paper is going to be late. I’ll slip it under your door.”
But the paper never came. So Harvey sent him an e-mail in mid-December.
“Look,” Harvey wrote, “I know that you’re capable of doing this work, so I need you to tell me
what’s going on. I don’t want to fail you. I’d rather give you an incomplete.”
No reply. By January, failing him was her only option.
Giles must have seen the grade right away, because he replied to Harvey’s December e-mail the
same night she entered the F. He apologized for the late response and told Harvey that he had
been on vacation over break and did not have access to e-mail. Harvey knew it was not true.
In the e-mail, he asked, “Is there anyway I could pass instead of getting an incomplete? I
promise I’ll work on this paper.”
“No, I have to give you an incomplete,” Harvey replied the next morning on Jan. 4. “That’s the
only option other than an F. Come see me the first week of second semester so we can talk.”
“Clearly, no student wants an F, but I think it’s significant that he didn’t want an incomplete,
either,” said Harvey. “For whatever set of reasons personal for him, he didn’t want an
incomplete. He wanted it done.”
Perhaps the suggestion of the concept of “incomplete” was unattractive and unsatisfying for
Giles. Two days before taking his life, perhaps the last thing he wanted was unfinished business.
But he didn’t plead with Harvey and didn’t push his luck. In fact, Harvey did not hear back from
him after Jan. 4.
Giles didn’t tell Pam or Jim about his academic dilemma. As far as they could tell, Giles was
enjoying his break.
Two days before his death, as Giles was standing behind the kitchen counter, Pam looked over at
him from the living room and told him, “You know Giles, you’re an amazing kid. I love you, and
thank you for all you do.”
Giles only smiled, Pam remembered.
That same night, at 9 o’clock when Pam was in bed, she said to her son, “Giles, come in here and
snuggle with me.”
“Oh, mom…” Giles shook his head.
“Oh, come on, Giles!”
“Then I played the evil card,” said Pam.
“Someday, I may not be around, and you’ll regret that moment that you never took time with
your mother to give her a hug before bed.”
Giles came pouncing in, wrapping his arms around her. “You’re such an evil mother,” he joked.
There they laid for 2o or so minutes, holding one another.
And softly he said, “I love you, Mom,” before she drifted off to sleep.
“I want you to know this is none of your fault… I’ve always felt out of
place and secluded from everything around me…. I wanted to leave this
life a long time ago. I want to start over with a clean slate. I love you and
will miss you. I hope to see you again wherever I go…”
–Giles Joslyn, January 5, 2012
Shortly after noon on Jan. 4, Giles posted as his Facebook status, “Have you ever heard a song
from so long ago with so many memories tied to it that it made you cry? And didn't you wish
that you could go back into time when everything seemed so much simpler and carefree? Those
are songs that are the soundtrack of our lives... the ones that bring back childhood memories,
best friends, first love, first heartbreak... the memories.”
Pam saw the post, and she later asked him, “Giles, what’s that post about?” He started singing
the song to her: “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee…” It was “American
Pie” by Don McLean—stuck in his head, Giles told her. “I said, that’s a depressing song, Giles!”
He didn’t seem to think so.
That night, Jim and the boys watched Contagion in the living room while Pam sat at the dining
room table organizing the next day’s lesson plan. They went to bed relatively early, but Jim did
not sleep well.
He woke that morning on Jan. 5 with an overwhelming feeling of despair, of “God-awful dread,”
he said.
“From the moment I woke up, I thought, what was the dream that I had? I couldn’t remember,”
said Jim.
He had his performance evaluation that afternoon where he worked at the University of Iowa
hospital, so his first assumption was that, Oh God, this is about my performance evaluation. He
never shook the apprehensive feeling.
It was a rather typical morning for Pam, however.
She woke Giles up early right before leaving for work at the high school.
She poked at him and said, “Giles, you might want to get up and enjoy the day. It’s a beautiful
day!”
He groaned a little, but finally obliged. Pam then asked him to pick up some chicken feed at the
store for her chickens she had in the backyard. He groaned, but then promised he would.
“I love you, Giles! Have a great day!” He returned the gesture.
After she left, Giles headed on down to Farm N’ Fleet to pick up the feed. Zac Pace’s sister,
Britnae, was working the checkout line next to Giles and recognized him as the kid her brother
drove home from school.
“So are you in school?” Britnae remembers the cashier asking him.
“Yeah,” Giles said. “I’m on winter break right now, but I’ll be going back to Drake in about a
week.”
They wished each other a nice day, and then Giles was off.
But no one knows what happened from then until noon, except for that he watched Seven
Pounds starring Will Smith, proven by his Netflix account.
The movie is about Smith’s struggle to redeem himself in order to make up for a gut-wrenching
regret of the past. To do so, he finds seven worthy, deserving individuals and plans to give them
generous gifts—his organs—after his death. At the end of the movie, Smith commits suicide by
electrocution.
Shortly after noon on Jan. 5, 2012, Giles did the same.
He called 911 and told them that he was going to take his life by electrocution and that, “My dog
will be in the house. Please don’t hurt my dog.”
Immediately, the women working the 911 dispatch recognized Giles’s name. Isn’t that the kid
Connie’s son drives to college?
Connie was Zac’s mother, and she was a 911 dispatcher. She worked the night shift, though, and
was not in when Giles called around noon that day.
It eats away at her that she couldn’t have been there. She thinks about if frequently. What if I
had taken the call? Could I have talked him out of it? Frankly, there was no way she would have
been able to take the call.
“—But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t wish she could have,” said Pace.
The police arrived at the Joslyn residence within three minutes. They attempted to shut off the
electricity on Giles’s block as fast as possible, but it was too late.
Scrawled in pen on a piece of white notepad paper, Giles left his note. In it, he expressed his love
for his family, his remorse and apology for the pain he would cause them, expressed that he
wished his organs to be donated, and that death was something he had contemplated for a long
time. Before signing his name, he asked that his family remember that this was his own choice,
and he reminded each of them that he loved them one last time.
*** *** ***
“Looking at his life, there’s so much to be learned...” –Justin Duruji
How was it even fathomable? That the most kind-hearted, life-embracing, upbeat person they
knew was gone. How was it fathomable that his music would never again be heard echoing in
the third floor hall, or that they would never see him whisk along on his bicycle again?
Jim felt incapacitated. He burned every meal he made. He left his car running all day. And his
heart thumped so loud that he had to ask Pam, “Do you hear it, too?” They were in shock.
In fact, there was not one person who did not feel the same overwhelming sense of shock upon
hearing the news.
Andrew Soelter fell out of his chair in tears and cried until he fell asleep. On vacation, Tom
Sletto didn’t speak to his wife for over an hour as he tried to contemplate what went wrong.
Chris Kottenstette had to pull over his car after he got the call from the dean. “I had to wrap my
mind around the fact that I won’t ever see him again,” he said. He broke down when it hit him.
Braeden Stanley, who was in India, didn’t leave his hotel room for breakfast for more than an
hour because he couldn’t pull himself together. On a bus tour, he sat alone and stared
mindlessly out the window as his thoughts raced. At work, Nicole Kasperbauer sat in the back
room in tears. When Zac Pace packed his bags in his car, about to head back to Muscatine for
the funeral, he couldn’t leave. He sat in the driver’s seat unable to turn the key, struggling to
acknowledge that he wouldn’t be driving Giles back home again.
No, there was nothing fathomable about it. Immediately, an instinctive search for an answer
overcame each of them. How could this have happened? they thought. Why? And then, the
guilt. It stung like the sharp puncture of a needle. How could I have prevented this? Why didn’t
I see it coming? Could I have invited him to dinner one last time? They were questions they all
asked of themselves; it was a feeling that almost all struggled with.
“I’ll never forget the things we didn’t see about him that caused him to do that,” said Marica
Potkonjak, a fourth floor resident. “We all saw the Giles that was always happy and never rude
to anybody. But we never saw the Giles that was really hurting inside. That’s what I’ll never
forget. That’s what makes me feel guilty, that I couldn’t see that. It’ll cause me to look at other
people differently, too. Even if on the outside they look like they’re okay, they might actually not
be.”
His suicide was perhaps so unexpected, so shocking, because it so drastically contrasted the way
he presented himself to others.
One of the greatest lessons that he taught Emily Lofgren was that any struggle that confronted
her was one she could overcome. And it so pained her that, ultimately, Giles did not wholly
believe what he had seemed to live by so demonstratively.
The same perplexed McNett, Harvey, Kunkel, John Schultz, his parents—virtually everybody
who knew him, because on the outside, Giles—always smiling—appeared to have it all, Schultz
said.
“He had supportive parents who were passionate for what he was doing, he was kind, he was
intelligent. He had every single attribute a person needs to be successful,” he said. “To have
someone appear to have it all, but to feel so alone, that there’s only one way out? It’s scary.”
So how was it that the same person who never had a negative thing to say was actually drowning
in loneliness?
“It doesn’t make sense,” said McNett. “It contrasted what he did, because he didn’t let it show—
what he was going through, what he was thinking, and whatever dark might have been dwelling
in his mind. He didn’t let it show. It almost proves how good of a person he was. Even though he
had problems, he didn’t force them onto other people. He had troubles in his mind, but he didn’t
bring you down. He kept his good attitude and his good mood. It’s impressive.”
His positivity and nonjudgmental attitude were also impressive: Neither ever failed.
“[He and I] had a conversation about we don’t get why people are mean,” Duruji said. “Some
people, as soon as they meet somebody, they’re automatically mean to them, maybe because of
how they’re dressed. [Giles] said, ‘You don’t know what that person’s been through.’ Your first
impression should always be to be nice to people. He really lived by what he said.”
The impact that Giles had on these young college students, whether at Drake or from Muscatine,
is one that will follow them not just through college, but for the rest of their life. They don’t look
at happy people the same way anymore. They don’t judge smiles, and respect has greater
meaning now. Now, a trivial invite to lunch or dinner is not so trivial, but much greater, because
what if…what if it could have made the difference?
But of course, they would never know the answer to that. There is nothing they will find an
answer to, the more they search.
“You have to acknowledge at some point, maybe there wasn’t something you could’ve done,”
Pace said. “What about what can you do now?”
Perhaps they can be a little more like Giles. Now, that’s what they’re focusing on—what they can
change about themselves.
“I don’t ever want to feel like I could’ve done more to stop something like that,” fourth floor
resident Kirby Lampe said. “I want to be able to feel that I did everything that I possibly could
have to make them feel accepted. I wouldn’t necessarily say [Giles] got bullied, but him being
alone a lot of the time was something that no one should have to do.”
For Maya Sullivan, not only did Giles impact how she treated others, but how she planned on
remembering them—primarily her father.
Sullivan’s father is chronically ill. She doesn’t have to wait next to the phone, but she worries.
The years he has left is unpredictable, and after Giles’s unexpected death, Sullivan needed to
assure herself that she would do everything she could to hold onto her father’s memory. This
summer, she plans on videotaping her father telling her the stories he always shares with her.
She wants to remember her favorite stories the way he told them, so that she never forgets.
“[Giles’s death] just reminded me of how incredibly precious life is,” she said. “I can learn so
much from Giles. I can apply all of this energy I’m putting into being upset; I can learn that I
need to do something positive with this energy that he’s given me. The impact with his death
was this new motivation to preserve my memories of people who I know don’t have that much
time left—to be able to keep them alive as much as I can for as long as I can.”
Others also found use for all of that energy built up inside of them that they had expressed
previously through tears and answerless questions. They found a positive use. As soon as he
heard the news of his death, Chris Fairbank knew how he would appropriately memorialize
Giles: through music. He wrote a song for Giles he called “Joslyn.” “With a string on his finger,
her body in his arms, 2 a.m. and Joslyn played along…” Fairbank wrote the song in one night.
“It did what I wanted it to do,” Fairbank said. “It gave him a little more life.”
For an art class, Hunter Berry, a Muscatine 2011 grad, sketched a detailed, shaded pencil
drawing of Giles’s violin to remember him, which she plans on framing to give to Pam and Jim.
Kelsey Beyer remembers Giles primarily as one of the biggest players in influencing her to
change her major to music. Seeing his persistence and love for the violin provided her hope that
she could one day have that same zeal as a musician.
“One thing that helped us get through a lot was knowing that his passing, in many ways, [has
encouraged others] to try to be better people as a result of him,” said Pam. “He still continues to
affect so many people. That’s part of healing, too, just knowing we can be better people.”
So many knew they would never forget Giles and his impact. Hundreds showed at his funeral,
and the line to pay respects took three hours, out the door.
Pace was at a loss for words when he finally reached Pam and Jim alongside Giles’s casket. “I’m
sorry for your loss” seemed to be understating his true pain.
“What do you say at a visitation? With this being so unexpected, you’re putting this family in a
position that no family should have to be in,” Pace said, “so what do you say to that? How do you
express your deepest sympathies for something that you shouldn’t have to be sympathizing for
and they shouldn’t have to be going through?”
But all he could muster was his sympathy and apology for their loss, and when Pam replied, “I’m
sorry for your loss” back to him, he was even more speechless than before.
“Here’s this woman who has just lost her son, the joy of her life, a person she has invested a lot
of herself in, and she’s apologizing to me because I lost a dear friend. That’s the sort of family
that he comes from,” Pace said. “How do you look someone in the eye and not wallow? How do
you say, ‘thank you so much for your sympathy?’ Instead, his mom said to me, ‘I’m so sorry for
your loss,” knowing that I was very close to him, and I think his family was very cognizant of
that. That, in a nutshell, is his family.”
When Pace played back the Seussical the Musical cassette video, he bawled. Though only his
first memory of Giles, it is the most expressive of Giles’s character and their relationship.
“That’s something I’m never gonna forget,” he said. “That holds a special place in my heart, just
because it’s…it’s so Giles. I was an elephant and Giles was a fish, and we’re up there singing
about Dr. Seuss characters. It was hilarious. It just totally seemed like an accurate
representation of our relationship… It just seems right.”
In retrospect, perhaps it was Dr. Seuss’s lessons that Giles had always lived by.
At the music camp at UW-Stevens Point, the campers and counselors often pondered the adult
meaning behind the children’s parables in Seuss’s books. Indeed there was, they said, something
greater and deeper in his message to children—perhaps a valuable lesson to be learned about
life.
Since November, there had been a Dr. Seuss exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and
Industry, and in early January, Patrick Gallagher contacted Giles and a few other friends from
camp to ask if they would like to go see the exhibit, at least for old time’s sake. But too many
schedules conflicted, and it was difficult for everyone to travel to Chicago, so, on Jan. 6, the last
Friday of his winter break, Gallagher only went with his mother and sister.
He thought of Giles and his old friends from camp upon seeing the exhibit, remembering all of
their late-night Seuss debates about the intricate lessons in the simplest of children’s stories. He
spent the day downtown, and when he returned home that evening around 5, just at sunset, he
logged into Facebook, only to discover what had happened the day before on Jan. 5. Only to
discover what he didn’t want to and could not believe.
*** *** ***
Every time that Brady Oates drives home to Franklin, Wis., he passes the sign for Joslin, Ill. off
of Interstate 80, and he can’t help but think of Giles. The little things like that remind him—
remind us all—of Giles.
Last time he passed it, he sent a picture of it to Kottenstette through text. “That’s my boy,” he
said in the message. “It’s spelled wrong, but it’s still Giles—to me, at least.”
“Chris told me he still thinks about him every day,” Oates said. “I told him, ‘I don’t think there’s
anyone who doesn’t.’
“He made an impact on all of us, and we’ll never forget him for it.”
And how could we forget him? We had shared our first semester of the newest chapter of our
lives with Giles, and he, with his violin, was the first to bring us together.
“I still think about him every day, and I still pray for him and his family every single day before I
go to bed,” Kottenstette said. “It’s not something I’m just going to forget about. If people forget,
I feel like they’re almost becoming guilty of denying the fact that he had an impact on their life.”
It’s almost impossible to forget, because the impact he had on each and every one of our lives is
so far reaching, so deep within—no, we won’t forget.
There are too many little things to remind us, anyway.
On a sunny February afternoon, Jane Thottiyil and Nicole Kasperbauer headed to Meredith Hall
for class, when suddenly, Thottiyil felt the swift breeze of a whizzing bicycle zoom past her. She
turned her head to glance in its direction, and for a split second, she thought, Giles??? The
thought startled her. She blinked, and then the bicyclist was gone. And she disregarded the
startling thought, because she knew that only in her memory could she see Giles zooming
around on his cadet blue Belleville bicycle. The settling reality panged her.
But the little things still frequently remind her—remind us all—of Giles. Partly because, for us,
the little things aren’t so little anymore. They’re more precious, more significant in the grand
scheme. The little things remind us that life is precious—that Giles’s life was precious—and that,
if we count them—all of the “Hey, how are ya’s,” all of the invites to dinner, all of the
compliments to strangers or acquaintances or good friends—the little things amount to
something great, something hard to come by in a form so pure and unblemished and
distinguished, in a form so undiscriminating and true—something so many easily claim to
possess, yet then so easily contradict. It’s something we so beautifully learned from Giles,
something, despite everything, only he had perfected so well:
Kindness.